Chrome learns to open Office docs with help from a 25MB extension

Google’s got some (relatively) exciting news to share with you about Chrome! If you’re running the browser’s Beta channel, you’re now able to view Microsoft Office documents right inside Chrome. Sort of, anyway. Chrome can’t pull off this magic trick on its own just yet. The actual document-previewing hocus-pocus is performed by a 25-megabyte extension called, logically enough, the Chrome Office Viewer. Just like the browser you need to be running to use it, the extension itself is currently beta. That means you can expect a few hiccups here and there.

The most annoying “hiccup” so far is the lack of formatting fidelity. The few Word documents I tried out in Chrome didn’t look a heck of a lot like they did in Word. Here’s the same page from a document open in both programs side-by-side:

Obviously a little glitch like a paragraph not wrapping around an inline image is something you can deal with from a third-party viewer. But if that viewer drops entire blocks of text, that makes it much less usable. If I open a document, I assume I’m seeing the whole thing. Right now with Chrome’s Office Viewer, that might not be the case.

Still, for quick-and-dirty document viewing, it’s good enough. It does make it so you don’t have to download Microsoft’s individual viewers (assuming you don’t own Office), which saves you some bandwidth and hard drive space. They’re about 160MB total as opposed to a single 25MB download. There’s also a security benefit: Trojanized Word docs or Excel sheets won’t be able to infect your computer if you happen to open one in Chrome.

Another alternative would be to install Google’s own Docs PDF/Powerpoint Viewer extension, which open these same links on the web. Instead of downloading the Office files to your machine an opening them locally, it re-writes the links so that they’re opened with the Google Docs Previewer.

It won’t work if you’re offline, but if that’s the case you’re probably not seeing a lot of web links to Office documents anyway.

And you could always use Microsoft’s own, free Office Web apps to view these files. One big advantage over Chrome is that the MS tools format Office documents perfectly — which might be important to some of you.